Saturday, August 2, 2008
Celebulous - the beginning
Welcome to Celebulous — the fantasy celebrity-sightings game that’s sweeping the world. Bring your friends or co-workers together in a league today. Find out how to get started now!
Also, if you're playing celebulous or thinking about getting started, please sign in by leaving a comment below.
Image: Jamie Lynn Spears scored more front-cover points than big sister Britney Spears, even though they both were featured in the August 11, 2008 edition of OK! Magazine
The Rules
Welcome to Celebulous — the fantasy celebrity-sightings game that’s sweeping the world.
The concept is simple. Everybody in the league picks a team of celebrities who score points every time they appear in the major celebrity-sighting magazines. You can set the rules however you like. Below is a simple set of regulations anyone can use to get their league started.
The Simple Celebulous
These rules make the game simple and fun for anybody to enjoy, regardless of their levels of competitiveness, interest, and knowledge of the hopelessly enfamed. Feel free to adapt these rules however you see fit.
THE LEAGUE
Get a group of people together — as few as 2 or 3 will work, though most people seem to really enjoy leagues with about 8 or 10 teams.
THE QUEEN (OR KING)
Choose someone you all trust and respect to act as the queen (or king, as the case may be). If you can’t decide, draw straws. It will be this person’s responsibility to tally up the scores each week and help make sure the process of adding and dropping celebs from teams happens fairly, based on the rules below (which are simple). Pick a dutchess (or duke) too, who can carry out these duties when the queen (or king) has jetted off to Fire Island or the Vinyard for the week.
THE DRAFT
Draft a roster of celebrities for your teams. Draw numbers to determine the order of picks in the first round. For the second round, reverse the order. For the third round, go back to the original order. For the fourth round, reverse again. This keeps it fair. Continue in this way for ten rounds. At the end of the draft, each team will have 10 celebs.
POINTS
Each time one of your celebrities is pictured in Us Weekly or OK! magazine (U.S. editions), you are awarded points based on the following scale:
- Base points
+ 10 - Front page main picture
+ 06 - Full 2-page spread (body spans both pages)
+ 05 - Front page inset picture
+ 04 - full-page picture (touching all 4 edges of page)
+ 04 - 2-page picture the size of 1 full-page picture
+ 02 - page-spanning picture (touching 2 opposite edges of page — top to bottom or left to right -- allowance made for page title/picture caption only)
+ 02 - 2-page picture that doesn't touch two opposite edges but is approximately the same length of a 1-page-spanning picture
+ 01 - any other picture
- Bonus points
+ 01 - bikini (women) / no shirt (men) [no bonus points for shirtless/bikini'd people under the age of 16]
+ 03 - blurred out due to nudity/profanity
- Reproductions of covers of other magazines
- only the celeb being highlighted by the accompanying story scores points
- Giant photo spreads of 6+ people
- only identified individuals score points -- they score points relative to what they would score for a similar-sized individual shot of themselves.
- Ads
- don't count for points.
THE SEASON
You can start and end whenever you want. 12 weeks works well. So does a full year. Whatever works best for you and your leaguemates. At the conclusion of the season, you can add on two weeks for head-to-head playoffs among the top 4 teams, if you wish. You can always change the length of the schedule during the season if everyone agrees. Or, if you find your season length is too long or too short, fix it before your next season begins.
THE STANDINGS
Each team’s total points are added up each week based on the score tallies of the individual celebrities in that week’s editions of Us Weekly and OK magazine. After the magazines hit the newsstands each week, the queen/king should tally the scores for each celeb, determine each team’s total score, and send the results out to the rest of the league members. The queen/king can check this site each week, as scoring tallies (which are not official and should not be depended on exclusively) will usually be posted to this site.
ADDING/DROPPING CELEBS
Each week, each team can add one celebrity to their team that is not already on any other team. Adding a celebrity requires also dropping a celebrity, to maintain the 10-celeb roster size. All add requests must be made by Friday at noon, and accompanied by the name of the celebrity to be dropped. If two teams both request to add the same celebrity, the team that is currently lower in the standings gets priority. (If the teams are equal in the standings, flip a coin, draw straws, play rock-paper-scissors, or find some other equitable method of arbitration.) You may not always get your first choice of a celeb on a given week, so all add requests should be accompanied by a prioritized list of secondary choices, should your primary choice not be available. If none of your requested celebs are available because they are all taken by other teams with higher priority, then your team’s roster will not change for the week. The queen/king should process all add requests by the end of the weekend and notify all the teams of all the roster changes by noon on Monday.
TRADES
Teams may trade celebs. You may include as many players as you want on either side of the deal, but your roster may never be bigger than 10, so if you receive 3 celebs and only give away 1, you must also drop 2 celebs. If you trade for 1 but give away 3, you may add 2 celebs that week without dropping any.
END OF SEASON
At the conclusion of the regular season, the teams with the top 4 point totals will enter head-to-head playoffs. If there are ties for any of the top 3 spots, a coin toss (or series of coin tosses) should be held to break the tie(s). If there is a tie for the fourth and final spot, the tied teams will compete during the next week to break the tie. The other teams will not compete that week, though they are still free to add or drop celebs that week.
Once the top 4 teams are determined, the playoffs will begin. In the first week, the #1 team will play against the #4 team, and the #2 team will play against the #3 team. The winners will play each other in the second week to determine the season champion. In the case of a tie during the payoffs, the team with the higher seed will be awarded the victory (for example, #1 has priority over #4 and #2 has priority over #3).
Immense praise and adulation should be given to both the playoff champion and the regular season champion. Should one team win the regular season and go on to win the playoffs, that team’s manager(s) should be awarded with their own red-carpet Hollywood extravaganza, hosted by Joan and Melissa Rivers.
AFTER THE SEASON
After the end-of-season red-carpet extravaganza award show is completed, agree on when to start the next season, and whether or not to change any of the rules in the meantime.
Each team should choose 3 celebrities to keep from their roster. The rest go back into the pool for the next year’s draft.
If any managers don’t want to keep playing, try to find a new manager to take over their team. If none can be found, simply drop all of that manager’s celebs back into the pool for the next season's draft.
The next season's draft should begin with the lowest-scoring team from the previous year, continue with the second-lowest scoring team, then the third-lowest, and so on up the standings. The second round should reverse order from the first round, and so on. The draft will only require seven rounds this time as each team will begin with three celebs already on the roster from the previous season.
FEEDBACK/DISCLAIMER
To help everyone get new ideas for their leagues, please post your comments or ideas for rules variations at the bottom of this page. You can freely change any of the rules listed here to suit your league’s needs and desires, but you’ll need to stick to the Celebulous scoring system if you want to make use of the weekly tallies that are often posted on this site.
Feel free to post any ideas for changing or adding to the scoring system. The Celebulous official scorers will take these under consideration, and reserve the right to change the scoring system at any time, at their sole discretion. We'll try to give several weeks' advance warning if we're going to change the scoring system, and we'll generally post proposed changes to the blog for debate ahead of time. Any changes to the scoring system will not be retroactive -- they will only apply to upcoming weeks.
The scores posted to this blog are compiled by humans who are fallible and as such they should just be considered guides. The writers of the Celebulous blog may also determine at some point that they no longer want to continue posting weekly tallies, or they may take weeks (or even months) off. Should that happen, they suggest that your league take the week(s) off as well, or compile its own scores for those weeks. Should you require 100% accuracy or consistency, you should not rely on this site. You recognize by playing this game that the writers of the Celebulous blog may occasionally make errors and you will not hold them responsible for those errors or any other disputes that may arise from the playing of this game. The writers of the Celebulous blog also retain the right to not post score tallies or to quit posting weekly tallies at any time.
And remember, it’s just a game. Have fun!